Saturday, July 31, 2004

The Price Of The Environment

Two Influences today - I, Robot, and my brother's mention about his lecturer, who edited the Aust Fin Review for a couple of years about how one cannot easily give a value to economic costs- everyone knows pollution is costing the environment, and in particular areas (my particular area of knowledge) of tourism, a very real economic cost. Though these are accepted truths, one cannot quantify the actual cost of a fishing ship's fuel in the water, and the fish it takes, compared to the cost to the tourism industry, let alone the environment that it effects. what matters though ( and this gets to the other influence of the day) is what is the logical choice, and which is the human choice. One who has seen the movie will understand the reasoning behind allowing humans to make mistakes that damage themselves, each other and the environment which allows our survival.

if one could give a human an actual value, that would debase that human's existence. who would really want to know how much their life is worth, ( not in the sense of the street price for 'taking care of business'). Much the same with the environment - if one could pay the dollar value to negate the cost of a certain sector of the environment, and thus destroy it, you might as well call the whole of existence off. better that some things remain priceless, separated on another path from economics and quantification. Though my trip to Europe may have a dollar value, it's worth to me will be unquantifiable.

Could you put a price on that?
posted by Keegan at 8:03 pm

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